In camera

A short story by André-Paul Duchâteau
Translation: Sue Neale

Photo : J-J Procureur

André-Paul Duchâteau, the Belgian writer, was born in 1925. His long career began early, in 1942, when he was taken under the wing of Stanislas-André Steeman (the famous Belgian author) and his excellent crime fiction imprint, Le Jury. Very soon he was also contributing to various comic books for young people, and in 1955 he became the scriptwriter of a series of detective stories: Ric Hochet, illustrated by Tibet and published in Tintin magazine. This collaboration achieved great popular success and in 2005 celebrated 50 years of uninterrupted publication with 70 titles to their name.

His career as a writer of crime fiction (novels and short stories) developed alongside that of comic book scriptwriter (both with Tibet and other illustrators). He is also the author of a number of crime fiction scripts for radio and televions. From the long list of novels and short stories, we would particularly highlight: De 5 à 7 avec la mort (1974), Doublure pour un assassin (1981), La petite fille à gauche sur la photo (1987), L'écrivain habite au 21 (1998, a biography of S-A Steeman).

Translator's note – it would appear that none of his titles are published in English at the present time. May 2006.

 

My special talent is to invent closed room mysteries. Over a period of 20 years I have written about a thousand short stories that could be called either crime or science fiction - never fantasy – all with the aim of fulfilling my Cartesian desire to offer a rational and logical solution to the mysteries that I describe rather than a fantastic one.

I am a distinguished member of that group of writers of popular literature but only the good taste variety. You know that these stories deal with a crime usually committed in a hermetically sealed environment. One of the masterpieces of the genre is still The mystery of the yellow room created by the immortal Gaston Leroux. How it appeals to my senses the “sweet refrain of the sealed room mystery”…!

I don't know why – following writers like Leroux, J D Carr and various others – I myself decided to tackle this particular category of mysteries for the various popular magazines to which I regularly contribute articles.

Please excuse my constant use of the word ‘I' Without doubt in the long run it is irritating for the reader, and in the short stories I write I usually avoid using the first person narrative, preferring to write my texts in the third person: “He did this, she did that, etc.”.

But the present tale – and I should have made this clear from the start – owes nothing (for once) to my imagination which people have sometimes called over the top. I have been obliged to use ‘I' in this case for the excellent reason that this really is my own true story and not that of an imaginary hero. So for once I am putting myself centre stage.

Yes me. André-Édmond Tyrel. I am offering you a slice of my life, a small piece of the life of a writer sometimes defined by his peers as the new master (excuse me for continuing to make this point discretely) of the sealed room mystery.

Actually to date three quarters of my creative output belongs to these fascinating problems that we call “impossible” which of course are nothing more than smokescreens, illusions, magic tricks or rely on some mechanical or scientific technique. I repeat, I reject wholeheartedly all absurd fantastical stories.

 

One huge room in the property set in the countryside not far from the Clairval forest where I live alone acts as a studio (like in the cinema), a prop store and a research laboratory. The inventory (if I can use this word in the same way as Jacques Prévert did) of what you can find there notably includes a railway carriage, an airline cabin, a telephone booth, a ship's cabin, a bathtub, a WC, a study, a bedroom, a cellar, a prison cell, an attic, a car, a safe, a fridge, a prompt's box (like in the theatre), a dressing room, a coffin, a trunk, a theatre box, a bamboo bridge, an old mill, a fisherman's hut, a hunting lodge, a bandstand, an armoured van, a swing, a shower, a church bell tower, a tennis court, a polling booth, a container, the hollow of a tree, a tent, a safety deposit box, a photo booth, a haunted house, a haystack, a lighthouse, a snowy garden, a scanning table, an Indian tepee, a hammock, an orchestra pit, a tomb, a hot air balloon, a cable car, a swimming pool, a dark ally and so on.

And this is not a complete list! I should add that some ingenious machinery makes it possible to transform the shape of the room from square to triangular, polygonal, octagonal, and rectangular or whatever you might like.

Each evening, after several solitary training sessions on my squash court, I generally go to my gigantic studio-shambles, in order to sit in the ejector seat of a Boeing to cogitate about my next subject (one a week, a challenge I have maintained for the last two decades). This is where I found one of my best ideas for a ‘perfect crime' for a short story called ‘ Is there a ghost in the machine ?'

You have probably gathered from all that that I live alone without any love interest of any kind. No wife, no mistress, no special friend. Where would I find the time to maintain any sensual or emotional relationship with another person when my free time is strictly ruled by my passion – which my many critics (all fantasy writers) would say is more a mania, an obsession, or even a paranoia.

A precise timetable - ruthless planning.

Tomorrow morning, at exactly 10 o'clock I will fax my thousandth short story, the one I am currently working out,to the weekly magazine Eurêka.

 

My tried and tested theory has never let me down. Picasso said: I don't seek, I find. Me, I will always find a new idea for the sealed room problem, because I know I absolutely have to find one.

Each time I start from a place or object which I have chosen for its potential. Each exhibit is added to others in my studio-lab-store. And – concentrating my gaze on the new gadget – I mentally take everything to bits and force my little grey cells to implode and explode – in order to find a solution to the impossible.

In last week's short story ‘ The cherry on top of the cake ' the sealed scene was an enormous cardboard cake from which a barely dressed girl, stabbed, suddenly appeared before the wild and lascivious eyes of a hundred club members. It is this cardboard confection, which is not far removed from this other new sealed room that I have chosen for my thousandth story, on which I am currently concentrating my thoughts. You really need to make a big splash to celebrate such an event. Hasn't almost everything already been tried out?

One idea burst out … the thousandth sealed room scene was right in front of me but did not look anything special. It consisted simply of a very large cardboard box (similar to those used for a tv or a dishwasher). The top flaps fold together to make a flexible roof when you slip inside.

Perhaps you have already guessed, the thousandth sealed room in which a crime will obviously be committed will be this cardboard packing box which I have personalised. Originally it belonged to a homeless person who, until a few days ago, lived in it day and night under one of the Seine bridges until the unfortunate night when death with his freezing fingers numbed him for eternity.

However, my method – the famous Tyrel system – is not just about observation. I literally slip into the skin of the character I play. In this case, a tramp, but not any down and out, no, a multimillionaire down on his luck who finds himself the victim of an impossible crime.

As usual, I talk things through out loud: “Right, it is midnight. I (that is my character), I am preparing to bed down for the night. Around me the inevitable witnesses, Old Irma and Scrapman, two other old down and outs.”

Playing out the scene in my studio-lab-store, then, I open the upper flaps of my cardboard box just as my character, let's call him DéDé, would have done. Then I close the folding roof above my head and seal it on the inside with tape to make sure there will be no draughts. He is very fussy this DéDé.

“How can I make this the perfect crime?” I ask myself snuggled up nice and warm in my box, in complete darkness, barely suffering from a slight feeling of claustrophobia.

The two witnesses, trustworthy but insolvent, will be formally identified : nobody. You hear me, nobody came near the cardboard castle between midnight and two in the morning.

And that's not all! It had begun to snow when Dédé shut up in his only known domicile; around the bridge's arch snow had covered up any possible footprints and it stopped falling at ten past midnight precisely.

“Yes, Commissaire Navarro,” confirmed toothless Old Irma. “Nobody came here … and you can see that there are no footprints or anything in this filthy snow!”

Scrapman was happy just to nod in agreement. DéDé, he was a mate, his friend. Who killed him, for God's sake? And how did they do it?

Huddled up in my palace, I try to reply to all the questions that I am mentally posing. That's my way. It generally takes and hour or two. Then, a miracle happens; the story, impossible and yet rational, appears fully formed in my head. Soon, I will just need to extract myself from my temporary shelter to throw myself into word-processing my writing and produce my thousandth story in one draft, almost without corrections; the story that hundreds and thousand of readers are waiting for with such exquisite but sad impatience.

In my cardboard coffin, it is hell; I am about to suffocate, my limbs are almost breaking with stiffness, I am sweating buckets. How can you become so stuck that you have to live – if you can call it living – in such conditions, surviving like Bernard the hermit crab in his ugly shell. Whereas I, a successful writer, I have everything you could want in this marvellous abode furnished with a hundred gadgets to make my life a gilt edged paradise.

All my meals come from a local three star restaurant. Nobody can get into my magnificent charming residence, or into the adjoining garage where two old Rollers – the ones that I prefer, the Phantoms –sit next to each other alongside a spanking new red Ferrari. The paradox is that in order to get out of this mousetrap and get back to my dream existence, I have to resolve the impossible murder of a tramp, an ex-mogul, who perhaps goes by the name Dédé.

 

“Commissaire, sir,” insisted Irma, “I am telling you again that snow was piled up at the entrance to the bridge.”

“You have already said that,” groaned Navarro. “What led you and Scrapman to discover the crime?”

“We have already explained,” added Scrapman, “but I will go over it again. Irma and I, we were chatting while having a smoke and we were also both joking because Dédé, he always said he slept badly but sitting next to his ‘villa', the snoring noises we heard! (Laughs). That's what struck us, Commissaire, sir, when suddenly the sounds stopped.”

“What time was it then?”

“We don't have a clock,” exclaimed Scapman. “But I would have said that it ought to have been around 2 in the morning, or something like that. What do you think old girl?”

“Yes that sounds right.”

“Good, Good. So, it is around two and nobody has come near the bridge. In the cardboard box, DéDé suddenly stops snoring and then…”

“Then,” continued Irma, “we looked over without thinking towards his Pullman and what do you think we saw, what did we see?”

Yes, what did they see? My body folded at an odd angle is aching all over, I am suffocating. It is time for me to get me out of this hellish trap so I can set up the 30,000 letters that everyone is waiting for. What do they see?

“Blood, Commissiare,” exclaimed Scrapman horrified. “Blood, a big stain had appeared on the cardboard spreading like ink on blotting paper!”

 

Curious, Scrapman's language! Sometimes he sounds like a tramp (well at least how I imagine they sound), sometimes he uses a strangely outdated vocabulary. (I know, I've got it, Scrapman – before going down in the world – was a coach at the Sorbonne.)

Commissaire Navarro is dumfounded (using daft expressions is catching).

“Incredible. However, he can't have stabbed himself. And the upper flaps of the box are taped up on the inside! For one thing the position of the chest wound is such that the victim could not have inflicted it on himself. For another the weapon has disappeared.”

“It's a ghost who did it Commissaire. Dédé always was challenged conventionis. So the evil spirits have had their revenge!”

No, no, no. André-Edmond Tyrel, let me remind you, is the master of impossible mysteries logically explained. It is not a question of being so low as to use so called poetic vagueness, like some of my colleagues, that dispenses with all reasonable explanations. You tell the story in whatever way you want and end in a similar way.

Mr Literary and Fantasy Storyteller there is no punch line to your story which turns out badly.

You, maker of mysteries, don't be common. Don't mix the dirty tea towels of crime fiction with the immaculate towels of the inexpressible.

I don't write in block capitals. The public - my public - proclaims its pleasure with subtle Cartesian resolutions. No ghosts, no malevolent or stupid spirits; I won't have it.

Shut up, skeletons.

For the thousandth time will I or won't I find the Idea, the Explanation (capitals are also catching), that is both coherent and consistent, and justified by the facts. It will give me a chance at last to get out of this prison where the air, which is thin and stifling, is likely to make my lungs burst if I have to stay in here much longer.

.. Hang on, what is happening? Whispers? Stifled laughter? Impossible.

Nobody – I have already said - can get into my studio-lab-store.

So Who? The Irrational? The forces who… which… etc of the dark? Ridiculous. I don't believe in them. Neither does the reader (of good crime fiction).

It's a conspiracy. I don't know how, but my fantasy writing colleagues have found a way to override the alarm system. They are going to take their vengeance for my published works. Behind all this, it about an author being brought to account – and this is not a pun.

Oh, a dagger thrust by the Invisible pierces my heart. The devils! How did they do it? I am going to die, trapped in my very own sealed room. Shut up for eternity. The perfect crime. Committed by these so called ghosts who are really writers envious of my success wearing hideous grins. I am mortified; my publisher will never forgive me.

The king of logic André-Edmond Tyrel
killed by ghosts
in whom he did not believe.

I die, humiliated and insulted. Like one of Dostoevsky's characters.

* * *

“Poor chap” is what the tramps said to the police who came at their request to check into the death of one of their friends, “Lightfingered Lou” – killed by a heart attack doubtless brought on by the exceptional cold which finally overwhelmed him in his inadequate cardboard shelter. A nice chap too. But a bit mad. He made out that he was a crime writer. It is possible, after all. It seems that he had been very well known during the fifties...